ready to sit myself right down again, but free of the wolf’s stomach.
At the end of another week my hands were shaking. Had I had a mirror that was not concave, I’m certain it would have shown me looking much older. Then Powl, with a great show of concern, admitted he had misspoken himself and probably caused all my confusion. What he had meant to say was that I was forbidden only the nothing in the belly of the wolf; the membrane itself was fair play.
In this manner I learned to sit still. It was a frightening thing, but I learned to live in the belly of the wolf. Ofttimes I wish there was still someone who would tie me up.
We had an early winter. It seems all the large changes of my life take place at the year’s failing.
Rain ate away all the colors of the leaves. The ground beneath the trees turned soggy black and then white with frost. I wore both my peasant shirts at once and was still blue-fingered, for no ingenious stove could heat a place with a slot in the roof covered only by canvas.
Powl would come up the hill with his lantern like a small star through the woods. It might be as late as eight and a half o’morning, but it would still be dark in here. That yellow star was nearly the only one we saw that first season, as he was teaching me the nature of lenses and of the sky. I had to take his lessons (all his lessons) with a great deal of faith.
He ground lenses in the weak daylight and I watched him, and then I ground mirrors for him (they are easier) as he lectured. I found it easier to grind and listen than just to listen. We tested the glass I worked by its spectra and convergence against a sheet of white paper glued to the wall, and sometimes my work ended as a telemetric mirror and sometimes it was a paperweight. Either way, Powl packed it all up and took it away again, down the hill, where I couldn’t follow.
My first foreign language under Powl’s tutelage was Allec, the language of the arts, which (he explained) is the language of no one alive and therefore equally unfair to all students. I had thought I knew some Allec, since all the vocabulary of armory and court ménage is in that rusty tongue, but to Powl Allec was not a series of identifying nouns but a language like
Zaquash or Modern Velonyie, in which one might haggle over fish, or describe where one found the bird sitting, which was not native to these inland hills.
For three months we spoke nothing but Allec in the observatory. Powl became a different person in that language. Where in Modern Velonyie he was smooth and ironical, when he spoke Allec he became quick, rattling, pressing, acquisitive, even rapacious. One might sell carpets, having an intonation like Powl’s Allec intonation, and make a very good living at it, too.
But Allec is the universal language of studies, and perhaps what was revealed there was only Powl’s character as a student rather than as a man of the world.
My Allec personality was mute for many weeks.
After the first few days of trying to translate everything in my mind into the damnable, shower-of-pebbles sounds, I suddenly began to think in Allec, and since I knew so very few Allec words, I could scarcely think, let alone communicate my simple desires. I remember standing in front of my teacher with tears in my eyes and a frying pan in my right hand, trying to tell him I could not get the burned egg off without some of his jeweler’s rouge, without knowing the word for egg or for washing. I would have used Velonyie, but at this point I had lost the use of the first language and not gained the second.
It was about then that Powl brought me the bag of colored glass marbles—in illustration of some point of optics, no doubt—and I grabbed on to them with childish fervor. I carried marbles with me everywhere and kept a close record of my successes at eightsie and yard circles. I made charts of distance rolled according to color and to size. When I lost one—a red one—in the detritus of the
At the end of another week my hands were shaking. Had I had a mirror that was not concave, I’m certain it would have shown me looking much older. Then Powl, with a great show of concern, admitted he had misspoken himself and probably caused all my confusion. What he had meant to say was that I was forbidden only the nothing in the belly of the wolf; the membrane itself was fair play.
In this manner I learned to sit still. It was a frightening thing, but I learned to live in the belly of the wolf. Ofttimes I wish there was still someone who would tie me up.
We had an early winter. It seems all the large changes of my life take place at the year’s failing.
Rain ate away all the colors of the leaves. The ground beneath the trees turned soggy black and then white with frost. I wore both my peasant shirts at once and was still blue-fingered, for no ingenious stove could heat a place with a slot in the roof covered only by canvas.
Powl would come up the hill with his lantern like a small star through the woods. It might be as late as eight and a half o’morning, but it would still be dark in here. That yellow star was nearly the only one we saw that first season, as he was teaching me the nature of lenses and of the sky. I had to take his lessons (all his lessons) with a great deal of faith.
He ground lenses in the weak daylight and I watched him, and then I ground mirrors for him (they are easier) as he lectured. I found it easier to grind and listen than just to listen. We tested the glass I worked by its spectra and convergence against a sheet of white paper glued to the wall, and sometimes my work ended as a telemetric mirror and sometimes it was a paperweight. Either way, Powl packed it all up and took it away again, down the hill, where I couldn’t follow.
My first foreign language under Powl’s tutelage was Allec, the language of the arts, which (he explained) is the language of no one alive and therefore equally unfair to all students. I had thought I knew some Allec, since all the vocabulary of armory and court ménage is in that rusty tongue, but to Powl Allec was not a series of identifying nouns but a language like
Zaquash or Modern Velonyie, in which one might haggle over fish, or describe where one found the bird sitting, which was not native to these inland hills.
For three months we spoke nothing but Allec in the observatory. Powl became a different person in that language. Where in Modern Velonyie he was smooth and ironical, when he spoke Allec he became quick, rattling, pressing, acquisitive, even rapacious. One might sell carpets, having an intonation like Powl’s Allec intonation, and make a very good living at it, too.
But Allec is the universal language of studies, and perhaps what was revealed there was only Powl’s character as a student rather than as a man of the world.
My Allec personality was mute for many weeks.
After the first few days of trying to translate everything in my mind into the damnable, shower-of-pebbles sounds, I suddenly began to think in Allec, and since I knew so very few Allec words, I could scarcely think, let alone communicate my simple desires. I remember standing in front of my teacher with tears in my eyes and a frying pan in my right hand, trying to tell him I could not get the burned egg off without some of his jeweler’s rouge, without knowing the word for egg or for washing. I would have used Velonyie, but at this point I had lost the use of the first language and not gained the second.
It was about then that Powl brought me the bag of colored glass marbles—in illustration of some point of optics, no doubt—and I grabbed on to them with childish fervor. I carried marbles with me everywhere and kept a close record of my successes at eightsie and yard circles. I made charts of distance rolled according to color and to size. When I lost one—a red one—in the detritus of the
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